45 Responses

I don’t even know what MAMP is, but there’s a very good reason to *NOT* have errors (PHP especially) piped out to the end client over the web (supposing that’s what you’re intending to re-enable).

Should a bug arise somewhere where a user/pass is used to access information, it could be spat out to the browser, giving away sensitive info to your viewers! Same can be said about any potentially unsafe information, like directory structure, etc… It would give some extra info to hackers as to how to compromise your site.

There’s a reason you’d want error reporting on whilst coding offline on your local development server for your clients.

Whilst your comment is semi-valid, it’s not valid in the case of a local development server.

Eli Sand — February 15, 2007

Searching requires me to put forth effort in to the form of clicking, reading and junk like that. It’s far easier for me to criticize than it is for me to research what I’m criticizing.

That and I personally frown on those bundled McDonalds meals. They always “do it for you” which leads to this exact, very, overly troublesome, always experienced, “why the…” issues which can so easily be avoided by the age old DIY method.

Besides, writing errors to logfiles is always the best method for PHP. There’s always a chance that an error message gets embedded in html comment tags, meaning you never see it.

sure there is a good reason to NOT display errors to the client
but you must be one hell of a novice programmer to not know the value of getting debug messages while you are developing, idiot

secondly I wouldnt use this novice toy, mamp on a production site. Its a tool for novices and beginners who barely understand php and mysql

otto gutschein — September 12, 2007

thanks for that hint – had some nasty bugs here in my scripts i couldn’t find with errors turned off.

don’t know why the MAMP-people disabled them in a development package :/

frank — September 24, 2007

Wow, some serious dickhead comment posters around here. novice toy? macdonald’s meals? sounds like a bunch of brats, its just web dev, take it easy.

frank — September 24, 2007

>a tool for novices and beginners who barely understand php and mysql

MAMP is a perfectly handy developer setup, hotshot. Screw off poser.

john — November 24, 2007

thanks, this was just what i was looking for:)

i think for you to write of mamp is plane silly, technically mamp is just the the initials of the stack so to say mamp is for newbies is actually an incredibly stupid thing to say. What I suspect you meant to say is that the package bundling them together is only for novices, but until you correctly learn the difference between a stack and a program I won’t be tacking you too seriously;)

marxista — February 3, 2008

Thanks, this helped me a lot! Greetings from Sweden.

Wes — February 21, 2008

MAMP is a beauty. Drag that baby to your applications and start her up. Real developers have deadlines to meet, and don’t have time to compile and install an entire technology stack for a simple dev environment.

Also: “Besides, writing errors to logfiles is always the best method for PHP”

Peter you sound like a wanker. No-one cares about your ‘expert’ abilities except you. I bet you like to plaster W3C compliant logos all over your websites to tell the world you know about standards rather than just getting on with it.

Anyone that has had to set-up a mac for local dev knows what a timesaver MAMP is.
Apache, MySQL, PHP with phpMyAdmin and SQLlite as a one-click install bundle – bloody great – you can configure the stack anyway you want after that – such as tweaking php.ini to control your degree of error reporting as this post suggests.

simon — September 6, 2008

Works for me. Thanks.

Dean — October 10, 2008

Thanks! Other sites mentioned first part about E_ALL, but didn’t mention Line 277 display_errors to “On.” Thanks for being thorough!

abc@abc.com — October 16, 2008

Dear Eli Sand

Would publish your site by xampp? If not then you should do know that most web developers don’t publish their site with xampp or mamp because they use them to develop site locally and since nobody could write perfect codes without errors, they normally turn display error on. You need that for debugging not for your visitors… Your visitors will see your site from another server which normally don’t came as a package like xampp or mamp. So stop, showing off, while other people are trying to share their knowledge and make the net a better net.

One note, however, for those that don’t know: If you’re using MAMP Pro, you need to navigate to the MAMP Pro application, then do a “Show Package Contents” on it to find the configuration files.
I’ve had some trouble figuring that out, since I assumed that MAMP Pro accessed all the same files as MAMP, but simply had more configuration options.

Dan Nicholls — April 12, 2009

Thanks for this, a big help when developing and when you’re a total newbie to Mac and therefore a total newbie to MAMP!

Chris — May 5, 2009

Nice one, Jamie.

This post saved a good few hours of frustration.

Thanks very much.

viopico — May 28, 2009

Thank you very much^^

Zack — August 14, 2009

Thanks man I owe you a beer!

Joe Elliott — August 19, 2009

For those on MAMP Pro, a even more simple solution:

Click on Server, then PHP… from there you get a fancy checkbox error selection.

Thanks for the post! I was looking to figure out how to do it, did it first with your post, then explored MAMP more…

Just spent a few hours trying to work out a problem with my code (I’m a complete newb to this) and it didn’t even click that I wasn’t getting an error on MAMP until I dropped the file on to my hosting and saw an error there.

Now I can get back to my learning!

Eduardo Rosado — November 22, 2010

Thanks! during local development we do need error reporting enabled and your post at top of Google’s list was really useful to quickly solve this issue.